Referring to words as words:
The words a/an and the are articles.
Your sentence has the word important three times.

Sometimes in novels, to show thinking:He is so ugly, thought Tara.

Italics are not really possible in handwriting. There are too many different styles of handwriting, and much handwriting tends to slope to the right anyway! But we can do most of the above in other ways. For example, we can show emphasis with underlining( ). We can indicate titles of books, films and so on with quotation marks(" ").